The investigation into 300 million emails has the media chief's support, but it could do more damage to him and his empire than anything that's come before.

A demonstrator in a Rupert Murdoch mask protests outside the News International offices in east London / Reuters

Damaging events have
been piling up for News Corp's troubled UK media operations in recent weeks.

A hard copy of a 2008 email chain sent
to James Murdoch warned that phone hacking was "rife" at the now-shuttered tabloid The News of the
World and could lead to a "nightmare scenario," calling into question again the truth of his sworn
testimony that he learned of systemic illegality only in 2011.

Electronic copies of that email chain
were deleted by News Corp subsidiaries
in March, 2010 and again in January, 2011, when the company knew it
was facing serious government inquires, raising the issue of another
possible cover-up.

Nine past and present editors and
reporters at The Sun, a second
News Corp UK tabloid, were arrested in late January and early February as
part of police investigation into whether journalists bribed public
officials for information, raising questions about whether this highly
profitable paper will also be consumed by a scandal that could severely
injure it or even threaten its existence.

Governmental investigators have
indicated that the phone-hacking scandal may be broader than previously
indicated and that early knowledge may have gone high up in News
International, Rupert Murdoch's UK holding company for media properties.

U.S. authorities have begun new inquiries
into whether News Corp, a U.S. company, may have violated the U.S. Foreign corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits bribing of foreign officials
(although the inquiry is at a very preliminary stage).

The source of the
information that led to these disclosures and arrests was an independent, internal
News Corp investigation that has been implacably pouring through more reams of
evidence at the News Corp UK newspapers, including 300 million emails and other documents.

To the consternation
of News Corp's UK employees, this meticulous inquiry has been
giving the British authorities unfettered access to all suspicious or damning
information -- acting as the arms and legs of three police investigations (into
phone hacking, computer hacking, and bribery of public officials), a
parliamentary inquiry, and an independent judicial inquiry. Numerous civil suits
by alleged victims of journalistic misdeeds have settled or are pending, with
more expected to come. They will, where possible, use information that the News Corp internal
investigation has given to government inquiries.

There are two
important dimensions of this internal inquiry right now.

First, unlike some corporate internal
inquiries, this one is and will remain an
independent finder of facts. The Murdochs created it and gave it unlimited
powers. It will continue to turn up
damning information for government investigators, given the apparent likelihood that illicit
practices were widespread. Rupert Murdoch has traveled to London to mollify The Sun's restive staff. But rather than launch a Watergate-like Saturday Night Massacre by firing the independent investigators, he issued a
letter affirming his support for their efforts.

Second, these facts
and the governmental investigations now pose a greater likelihood of serious
damage to the UK properties and news
personnel, to James Murdoch, and perhaps to News Corp itself than the threat last July, when the Murdochs let go News
International's CEO, Rebekah
Brooks, and precipitously shut down The
News of the World.

The internal inquiry's
independence and broad mandate stem from
its origins. After both Rupert and James
Murdoch admitted last summer that their UK properties had failed for years to
get to the truth of "repeated wrong-doing that occurred" (James's
words), News Corp created the Management
and Standards Committee (MSC) in
July 2011 to conduct a full
investigation of all UK practices and to give full information and cooperation
to all authorities.

In a recent press
release following the arrest of The Sun employees, News Corp said the Committee was created to:

undertake a review of all News International titles [The Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times],
regardless of cost, and to proactively co-operate with law enforcement and
other authorities if potentially relevant information arose at those titles...to
take responsibility for all matters in relation to phone hacking, payments to
the police and other related matters....The MSC structure is autonomous and independent of
News International. It has powers to
direct News International staff to co-operate fully with all external and
internal investigations, and to
preserve, obtain and disclose appropriate documents. [Emphasis
added.]

In his letter on
February 17, to "colleagues" at
The Sun, Murdoch praised their
"exceptional journalism" but went on to say:

My continuing respect makes this situation a source of great pain
for me. ... We will obey the law, illegal activities simply cannot and will not be
tolerated. ... [the Management and Standards Committee] has been instructed to
cooperate with the police. We will turn
over every piece of evidence we find---not just because we are obligated to but
because it is the right thing to do.

The MSC structure is filled with accomplished
lawyers. The chair of the MSC is a
noted British Queen's Counsel, Lord Grabiner. Among its members is the new News Corp General Counsel, Gerson Zweifach, who
until recently was a partner at a top U.S. firm, Williams and Connolly. Linklaters, a respected UK firm, is in charge
of the internal inquiry and has hired dozens of people, including forensic
accountants and forensic computer technicians. The Committee reports to Joel Klein, News Corp Executive VP and
director, and through Klein to Viet Dinh, a non-employee responsible
for keeping the whole News Corp board informed. Klein was head of the New York public school system after serving as
assistant attorney general (antitrust) under Bill Clinton. Dinh, a professor at Georgetown, was an assistant
attorney general (federal legal policy) under George W. Bush.

To be sure, some
corporate internal investigations are
whitewashes, asking narrow
questions or skewing the evidence. Enron's internal inquiry and News Corps's own
inquiry into phone hacking several years ago are prime examples. But there are also many examples of
companies that hire prestigious lawyers or law firms and take the hide off their
practices and their key personnel. The
investigation by Siemens, and HP's investigation of Mark Hurd's conduct,
are prime examples of internal investigations conducted in rigorous good
faith.

Here, numerous
factors support robust independence and unrelenting excavation of the facts. As
his letter to The Sun staff
demonstrates, Rupert Murdoch and News
Corp have demonstrably and publicly committed to the internal investigation--and cannot back off
without causing a firestorm (I was in Washington on that famous Saturday
night). The leading lawyers have independent reputations and will not sacrifice
their careers or their good character by participating in a cover-up. This
applies as well to the noted lawyers in News Corp employ (Dinh, Klein, and
Zweifach). The many different individuals intimately involved are a check on
each other--it is hard to imagine anyone suggesting an impropriety or blocking a line of questions.

The importance of
such an internal inquiry is shown in the discovery, in a stray storage
box, of the hard-copy
"warning" email that went to James Murdoch in 2008 and the
exploration of how this email was deleted from various News International
servers. The development of such facts might have eluded government
investigators or taken far longer.

The implications
of the steady flow of the internal inquiry's facts into governmental hands (and
perhaps onto to private litigants) cannot be ascertained at the moment, because
the authorities' investigations are not over.

But among the live
issues are the rising cost of all the civil law suits, of the investigation, and any fines
or penalties ($400 million has already been spent, according to news
reports); the possibility of civil or criminal claims against News Corp's UK
personnel at the newspapers and in the holding company, News
International; the fate of James Murdoch
(does he remain a top executive at News Corp, does he get charged in the
UK) the degree of damage at -- and
ultimate fate of -- The Sun
(to rally the troops,
Murdoch announced a new Sunday edition); the
effect of the "civil war," as some UK journalists have termed it,
between News Corp's UK reporters and editors and the investigators; whether
the U.S. inquiry has any legs (with all sorts of other adverse implications
possible under U.S. law for a media company); whether this leads to changes in
News Corp governance.

There is also the
general question about media practices and standards being addressed by the UK judicial inquiry, as well as the immediate
charge from The Sun that the MSC is violating reporters' rights to protect
sources by revealing reporters' sources.
In his letter, Rupert Murdoch acknowledged the importance of protecting sources, but said "we
cannot protect people who have paid public officials."

The independent internal inquiry
will grind forward. But in the back of
everyone's mind is the ultimate question: what will it do if -- conditional emphasized -- it uncovers damning
evidence of what did Rupert know, and when did he know it?

About the Author

Ben Heineman Jr. is is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and at the Harvard Law School's Program on Corporate Governance. He is the author of High Performance With High Integrity.

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